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With matching-grant money from Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO), a conservation program funded by the state lottery, they will use land-preservation tools called conservation easements to pay ranchers for the development rights to their property, then place those rights in permanent trusts. By selling development rights instead of the property, ranchers raise capital while saving open space and hanging on to their land. And because the property can never be developed, it loses half its market value. Thus ranchers can suddenly afford to pay taxes and keep the land in the family. Gunnison isn't the first community to launch a land-trust program: 1,200 of them have sprung up so far in the U.S. But unlike most, the Gunnison Legacy is a true grass-roots effort with no involvement from national conservation groups or wealthy landowners seeking tax breaks.
"Ranching is worth preserving not because it's a quaint 19th century agricultural practice," says Lohr, "but because cows are better than condos. Ranchland is crucial wildlife habitat, and tourism depends on pristine views. Bill and I agreed that ranchers deserve to be compensated for the open space they provide."
What's astonishing is that the bird watcher and the cowboy ever began having this conversation. The Old West of ranchers, miners and loggers has been so alienated from the New West of environmentalists, recreationists and urban refugees that bridges between the camps usually get washed out. A culture clash still divides the rock-ribbed citizens of Gunnison, a sleepy city of 5,000 on Highway 50, and the flamboyant ex-hippies and ski bums of Crested Butte, the pastel Victorian resort town 26 miles to the north.
Lohr, 43, a San Franciscan with blond hair and a soft, open manner, moved to Crested Butte from New Hampshire in 1986, when she became director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a high-altitude field station based in the ghost town of Gothic. The federal grazing land around the lab was leased by a "range pool" that included Trampe, now 50, who left college and started ranching in 1967 after his father dropped dead in the field. Trampe's elders in the range pool couldn't fathom the lab's scientists. "To a rancher, it's strange to see somebody crawling around the hillside huntin' bugs," says Trampe.
The two sides were always fighting. When the ranchers were ready to move a herd, for instance, they didn't stop to think what a thousand hooves would do to the tiny sponge traps scientists use to collect invertebrates from beaver ponds. Seeking detente, Lohr and Trampe started talking, and each was surprised by the other's willingness to learn. They began having long discussions about agriculture and the environment. Lohr saw that the area's century-old cattle-rotation system--driving the herds into the high country in summer while growing hay on the valley floor--meshes with the natural ecological cycle, benefiting the land. She married a local plumber and became a board member of the High Country Citizens' Alliance, an influential environmental group, but grew impatient with trust-fund recreationists who wanted to force cattle out of the high meadows to make room for mountain bikes. Slowly, other enviros came to realize that cows weren't the enemy. A new alliance began to emerge.